EC-exclusive interview with Tim Cook, Slacklash, and tech inclusion

An EC-exclusive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook

TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino traveled to Florida this week to talk with Tim Cook about Apple’s developer education initiatives and also meet with high school developer Liam Rosenfeld of Lyman High School. Apple wants to attract the next set of app developers like Liam into the Xcode world, and the company is building a more ambitious strategy to do so going forward:

But that conversation with Liam does bring up some questions, and I ask Cook whether the thinks that there are more viable pathways to coding, especially for people with non-standard education or backgrounds.

“I don’t think a four year degree is necessary to be proficient at coding,” says Cook. “I think that’s an old, traditional view. What we found out is that if we can get coding in in the early grades and have a progression of difficulty over the tenure of somebody’s high school years, by the time you graduate kids like Liam, as an example of this, they’re already writing apps that could be put on the App Store.”

Against the Slacklash

TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans often writes on developer tools and productivity (see, for example, his Extra Crunch overview of the headless CMS space). Now, he sets his sights on Slack, and finds the product … much better and more productive than many would have you believe, and offers tips for maximizing its value:

Contrarian view: Slack is not inherently bad. Rather, the particular way in which you are misusing it epitomizes your company’s deeper problems. I’m the CTO of a company which uses Slack extensively, successfully, and happily — but because we’re a consultancy, I have also been the sometime member of dozens of others’ Slack workspaces, where I have witnessed all the various flavors of flaws recounted above. In my experience, those are not actually caused by Slack.

AWS remains in firm control of the cloud infrastructure market

Our enterprise(ing) reporter Ron Miller wrote an update on the latest wave of market figures for the major cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Tens of billions of dollars hinges on the perturbations of these numbers, and now we are starting to see the success of a new wave of cloud native entrants:

One thing that has happened over the last several years is the companies behind AWS (and to some extent even AWS itself) have decided to stake their claim in the hybrid space, that is a recognition that for the considerable future, customers won’t be moving lock, stock and barrel to the cloud. Instead, they will live in this in-between hybrid world where some workloads live in on-premises data centers and some live in the public cloud.

Vendors like IBM, Google, and Microsoft are trying to cater to these companies by offering a set of tools to make it easier to manage your data in a uniform way, regardless of where it lives. This is sometimes referred to as a cloud native approach (although the definition of that term is a bit fluid at the moment.)

Verified Expert Brand Designer: Base

Yvonne Leow has her next profile of a brand designer, this time Base, which has partnered with Deezer, Kidbox, NeueHouse, and JFK Terminal 4 among many others on their brand designs (and for those who don’t know, Terminal 4 is the actually nice NYC airport terminal).

Yvonne interviewed Base partner Geoff Cook about the firm’s approach, and how to build great brands:

Yvonne Leow: What are the most common founder mistakes you see when it comes to branding?

Geoff Cook: This may sound provocative, but I think the most common mistake is that there is a belief in the tech world that branding should be approached iteratively like their approach to product development. Having now been through that process of iteration with both startups and the largest tech companies, we’ve found that the results are often compromised. Oftentimes if you iterate or have different groups weighing in throughout the process, it can be detrimental to the end result. It’s a conversation we’re now having with founders to say, “We’ve tried both ways, we’ve seen these results, and we would ask that you go along for the ride and put your trust in us, and we’ll ensure that you will arrive someplace really compelling.”

How to think about inclusion in tech, with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Part 2)

Our resident tech ethics writer Greg Epstein concludes his interview with professor of theoretical cosmology Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In this part, Greg dived into Chanda’s activism and thinking around inclusion in science and technology:

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I won’t make those same comments about myself, but I will say I think I worked pretty hard to get to where I am. But I also think that at least in my case, I’ve lived the life of a highly successful token.

For me the question is not how do I get one or two through the door, but how do I create an environment where people who want to be present are present. This is something that I’m thinking about a lot as I’m working on my book, which talks about all of the ways that I live with my science.

I am [trying to write about] my science in a way that says to people from the communities where I grew up and the communities that I am a part of, so to folks in the black community, to folks from east LA and in particular, El Sereno, which is where I grew up, that this is a book for you and that popular science books aren’t just for nerdy white kids, they’re also for nerdy black kids and nerdy Latinx kids.

Equity Transcribed: Why Om Malik thinks ‘the VC subsidized life is over’

Another week, another episode of TechCrunch Equity, this week hosted by Crunchbase’s Alex Wilhelm and our very own Kate Clark and Connie Loizos with guest Om Malik, a VC partner at True Ventures.

We have the latest transcript available for your perusal, which covered topics as diverse as Uber’s IPO, Groupon, and how the venture capital world will no longer subsidize San Francisco lifestyles anymore for growth.

Here is a bit of discussion on whether Travis Kalanick should have helped ring the bell for Uber (he observed from the floor):

Kate Clark:I know, but I was also erring on the side of feeling like he should have been up … He should be up there, but I’m really mixed on it. What do you think?

Om Malik:I think I am with Connie on this one. I have followed this company from day one, from the time it was … The idea was born in Paris. I was there at the same conference. And to where it is now. Yeah, there was a lot of mistakes which were made in the company. There are some terrible things which have happened, and they’re long lasting. Culturally, the company will have to do a lot more to overcome those challenges. But without Travis, a lot of things don’t happen.

Kate Clark:Absolutely.

Om Malik:And I think this is one moment where he’s not part of the company. He’s still a part of the board, and to not have a board member there. What kind of a message is … I think there’s a little bit of revisionist history there.

ICYMI: Earlier this week:

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.